Looking at the Present Through the Future: Science-Fiction Urbanism and Contingent and Relational Creativity1

Chapter 13 Looking at the Present Through the Future: Science-Fiction Urbanism and Contingent and Relational Creativity1 Rob Kitchin Writing fiction is a creative act. It involves the production of a narrative that tells a fictional story. Although much fiction is derivative of stories that have preceded it, and although much of it is clichéd, shallow, and uninspired, there is a steady stream of new works that continue to push boundaries with respect to style, substance, and foci. They are stories that are creative in ways that extend beyond the act of simply making something. Rather than being citational, imitative, and stereotypi- cal (where the plot lines and characters are similar to much of the fiction that had preceded), they are genuine attempts to challenge conventional tropes and styles and to say something meaningful about the world (rather than simply entertain). They are works that are insightful, surprising, educational, interesting, exciting, and enlightening; they interpolate (fill in holes) and extrapolate (make fragments into a whole); and they might be intertextual, but in knowing, clever, witty, and meaningful ways. They make their readers look at the world afresh with new perspectives. Such creative acts, I argue, do not arise out of nowhere, from some innate product of a novelist’s biological make-up (and thus are not measureable in some reductionist way through psychological testing). Instead, their creativity is a product of the writer’s skills and talents coupled with their embeddedness in networks of people, things, and places. These networks profoundly shape the fiction of creative acts. Writers learn the various facets of how to write—literacy, grammar, punctua- tion, composition, observation, translation (the process of taking knowledge of the world and converting it into a narrative), imagination, and speculation—of how to engage critically with philosophy, ideology, aspects of the human condition, and so on. Whereas some individuals might possess great talent and skill, these supposed “gifts” are nurtured, shaped, and encouraged by diverse factors such as schooling, tutoring in literary theory and praxis, exposure to other writers’ work, and encour- agement and critical feedback from peers. And although some writers might claim R. Kitchin ( ) National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis, Hume Building, NUL, Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] 1 Parts of this chapter are based on previously published work (see Dodge & Kitchin, 2000; Kitchin & Kneale, 2001; Kneale & Kitchin, 2002). P. Meusburger et al. (eds.), Milieus of Creativity, Knowledge and Space 2, 245 © Springer Science + Business Media B. V. 2009 MMeusburger_Ch13.inddeusburger_Ch13.indd 224545 11/28/2009/28/2009 33:44:34:44:34 PPMM 246 R. Kitchin to have had no formal training in creative writing, their abilities to craft a story has nonetheless been nurtured in informal ways. Nobody sits down to write as a fully formed writer. And a story derives its inspiration, focus, and politics from its writer’s life experiences and engagements with people and places. Take the novel Frankenstein, written by Mary Shelley and published 1818. It is a profoundly creative and imaginative work that provided the genesis for the genre of science fiction (Malmgren, 1991). The story and Shelley’s ability to write it did not come from nowhere; they were not the product of an innately talented mind. Rather, the book was a product of Shelley’s schooling, her engagements with other fiction, and her relations and discussions with the set of literary figures who constituted her circle of friends (Lord Byron, Dr. John Polidori, and Percy Shelley). It sprang from her travels around Europe and her reading of the cultural landscape. (Frankenstein was written in Geneva, with the Alps and locales such as Chillon Castle providing inspiration.) It issued from her knowledge and understanding of the radical changes occurring around her: the age of Enlightenment, the incipient industrial revolution, the development of rational scientific practice, and a growing sense of how science could advance society and how the future could be extrapolated from the present. Indeed, Shelley herself acknowledges in the introduction to the 1831 edition that the idea for the novel stemmed from a challenge to write a ghost story after she and her friends had read Fantasmagoriana, ou Recueil d’histoires d’apparitions de spectres, revenants, fantômes, etc. (Eyries, 1812), a French translation of a German book of ghost stories. A subsequent set of conversations about the scientific work of Erasmus Darwin and Luigi Galvani contributed the scientific underpinnings for the story. At later stages various drafts would have been read by friends, editors, and others, with edits then being applied to the text. Frankenstein was therefore the product of a com- plex engagement between Shelley and the world at a particular time and place. Just as other actors and actants (objects and items that have agency, such as various technologies and tools) shape writers, fiction itself does work in the world. Not only does it entertain, it affords a discursive medium of ideas that act as sources of insight and inspiration. This discursive work is sometimes acknowledged explicitly by others, perhaps through statements or interviews (“I have been profoundly influ- enced by the writings of …,” as in Mary Shelley’s case). In other instances it is implicitly acknowledged through intertextuality or imitation. Fiction is therefore an actant in the creative processes of other actors (e.g., teachers, journalists, engineers, urban planners, artists, and other novelists), often in ways that were never intended by the novelist. Nearly 200 years after the publication of Frankenstein, the novel and its ideas are still actively at work in the world. The ideas within the story serve as sources of film adaptations, derivative stories (e.g., The Bride of Frankenstein), and inspiration for a slew of other horror stories and films, not to mention the biotechnology sector—including the opponents of gene modification (GM) and ani- mal testing. It is no coincidence that this protest movement has labeled genetically modified crops “Frankenstein crops” to highlight their “unnatural” and “monstrous” qualities (see Bingham, 2002). This kind of science and the protests it incites are fresh stimuli and substantive issues for fiction writers. In other words, a recursive relationship can develop between fiction and fact. MMeusburger_Ch13.inddeusburger_Ch13.indd 224646 11/28/2009/28/2009 33:44:34:44:34 PPMM 13 Looking at the Present Through the Future 247 This chapter is an exploration of the creative writing by several science-fiction writers. I illustrate ways in which their writing emerges from diverse engagements with the world, how their fiction does work in the world, and how a recursive relationship has in some cases developed between novelists and people who read and act upon their stories. The empirical material for my argument comes from a project that involved analysis of 34 novels and four collections of short stories with plots focusing on the development and use of cyberspatial, virtual reality, other information and communication technologies (ICTs), and issues such as telemedia- tion, computer intelligence, surveillance and governance, person–machine relations (cyborgs), and the changing nature of work and urbanism (see Dodge & Kitchin, 2000; Kitchin & Kneale, 2001). All but two of the novels were by North American writers, all but two were by men, all were published between 1982 and 1998, and many belonged to the genre known as “cyberpunk.” Of particular interest in this project were the manners in which the novelists dealt with notions of space and time, given the supposed ways in which ICTs “destroy distance.” It also described the new geographies of the near future. In this chapter I confine my focus to ask- ing how the authors of these stories imagine urban environments and life and the nature of future cities. I argue that these novelists’ visions of the near future serve as a powerful cognitive lens on urbanism in the present, extrapolating from spatial processes that are already at work. This lens is no coincidence; fiction is a product of its place and time, and in some cases ideas are drawn from contemporary urban theory. As I show, this urban theory has, in turn, drawn inspiration from these novels, creating a recursive relationship between novelists and urban theorists. Introducing Science Fiction and Cyberpunk Since the time that science fiction emerged as a specific literary genre with the publication of Frankenstein (Malmgren, 1991), it has grown to become a very large and popular genre with many subgenres focused on particular realms or technologies. Focusing on the near or far future, but rarely set in the present day, science-fiction writers create imaginative worlds in which to explore new sciences and the meaning and nature of life. Suvin (1979) argues that they create a totalizing novum ( novelty, innovation)—entire new worlds, either fully imagined ones or this one in the future—by employing extrapolation and speculation. Suvin argues that these tactics create a sense of estrangement for readers by making the familiar strange. Science fiction’s appeal is that it opens readers to new ways of thinking and knowing, but in ways that are tempered by scientific rationale and explanation and by social and spatial metaphors that domesticate the implausibility of the narrative. These realms are not purely fantastical worlds, separated from what people understand as reality and what might seem rationally possible (such as with fantasy writing). Instead, they are worlds that seem plausible given where science seems to be heading. “S[cience] F[iction] rigorously and systematically ‘naturalizes’ or ‘domesticates’ its displace- ments and discontinuities” (Malmgren, 1991, p. 6). MMeusburger_Ch13.inddeusburger_Ch13.indd 224747 11/28/2009/28/2009 33:44:34:44:34 PPMM 248 R. Kitchin By grounding its science and society in the realities of peoples’ experiences, how- ever tenuously, science fiction thus has something about the present and the human condition.

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